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I am interested in the histories and (possible) futures of books and reading. In lieu of a post this week – I’m knee-deep in manuscript at the moment – here are two recent posts on print cultures in South Africa:

Today is Heritage Day and I tried to visit a museum. The museum was closed, so I took photographs of its façade and the surrounding suburb instead. Or, rather, the museum was open, but not to members of the public. Its opening ceremony was limited to members of the community and officials from the Department of Arts and Culture.

At the Fietas Museum.

I’ll return at some stage in the future, but I think that this museum in Fietas – a working-class suburb near the Johannesburg CBD – says a great deal about the complicated ways in which South Africans are reflecting on their past.

The front of the Fietas Museum.

I have very mixed feelings about Heritage Day. A lot of the debate about this public holiday on social media and local radio stations circles around – although never really articulates – its most problematic and unresolved feature: ‘heritage’ is a construct. Put simply, heritage is constituted of whatever parts of our past we choose to remember.

Partly because it is so difficult to define what exactly a South African heritage is, there have been various attempts to recast this holiday in ways which make it easier and less controversial to celebrate. The campaign to reinvent Heritage Day as a depoliticised National Braai Day emphasises most South Africans’ shared enthusiasm for barbecue.

In Fietas/Pageview/Vrededorp.

On the other end of the scale, the recent launch of Freedom Fridays by LeadSA – a fairly socially conservative campaign led by media outlets to encourage South Africans to be better citizens (whatever they may mean by that) – and the Department of Arts and Culture exhorts South Africans to wear something every Friday that symbolises their love for the country.

Both Braai Day and Freedom Day are problematic. Whatever the good intentions of its founders, Braai Day transforms Heritage Day into yet another opportunity for supermarkets to make quite a lot of money (in much the same way that Women’s Day has become another version of Mothers’ Day). And Freedom Friday promotes an unthinking patriotism which ignores South Africa’s far-from-uncomplicated political and social trajectory post-1994. The fact that it was launched six months before a general election can’t be harmful either.

Indeed, both elide South Africa’s deeply conflicted past: for all their enthusiasm for ‘heritage’, there’s very little history in how these two initiatives explore and redefine what it is to be South African.

One of the remaining shops in Fietas.

What discomforts me about Heritage Day is that it attempts to use South Africa’s past in much the same way as did the National Party during apartheid. In fact, Heritage Day is a renamed Shaka Day (instituted to pay homage to Shaka kaSenzangakhona, the most significant leader of the Zulu kingdom) which was co-opted by the apartheid state in an effort to invent a separate, distinct heritage for each of the race groups into which South Africans were divided.

Buying food in Fietas.

Over the weekend I visited another apartheid-era attempt to construct a discrete ethnic identity, and partly in the service of segregated city planning: the Oriental Plaza. Based in Fordsburg – a predominantly Indian suburb – the Plaza was created by the state in the mid-1970s as a kind of shopping mall for Indian traders. As the Plaza’s domes, décor, and palm trees suggest, it was designed with a kind of stereotyped Arab bazaar in mind – its architecture owes more to The Thief of Baghdadthan to any knowledge of Middle Eastern or south Asian architecture.

Many of the shop owners were there because they had been forced out of various Johannesburg suburbs. One of these was Fietas – consisting of Pageview and Vrededorp – an inner-city area of Johannesburg which had been settled by Indians since at least the beginning of the twentieth century. Fourteenth Avenue – where the Fietas Museum is now situated – was the area’s main shopping street, and was dominated by Indian-owned shops. In 1968, Vrededorp was rezoned as ‘white’ under the Group Areas Act, and in 1975, Indian shop owners were given notice that they had to leave – and many of them to the Oriental Plaza.

The Plaza was an attempt to contain Indian traders within a part of the city designated as ‘Indian’, and in a space which evoked a particular interpretation of their ‘Indian-ness’. My point here is not to criticise the shopkeepers and shoppers who chose – and still choose – to work and shop there. But, rather, to make the point that Johannesburg’s landscape is constituted of various attempts to define people’s heritage for them.

In the Oriental Plaza.

It’s for this reason that I find the Fietas museum so interesting: I hope that it will retrieve the profoundly traumatic history of the destruction of the suburb: of the people forced to move, of the lives and livelihoods destroyed, and of the homes and businesses bulldozed in an effort to make Fietas ‘white’.

In fact, I hope it will begin to answer a question that Teju Cole posed last week at a talk at the Troyeville Hotel. Referring to the ways in which we write about cities, he asked:

Cities are built on people’s bones. How, then, do we tell stories about cities so that those who have died, do not die a double death through forgetting? Below us, on street corners, are people’s dreams.

The problem with any attempt to define a specific South African heritage is that it tends to be a triumphalist retelling of the country’s past. It has, then, the potential to ignore ordinary struggles and ordinary lived realities: the lives of people who just got by under extraordinarily difficult conditions.

‘Why does it give me such a bad dose of the pip? Is it … the insistence that they’re purveying “cucina povera” (a style of cooking born of extreme Italian poverty)? Meat is rarely used in this; and, if it is, it’s of the innards and extremities variety.’

‘Part of [Stalin’s] sunniness mandate was the creation of a Soviet socialist food canon – source of all the meat patties (kotleti), mayonnaise-laden salads, and spicier fare from ethnic republics that would fuel the USSR for its next 50-plus years.’ (Thanks, Nafisa!)

Despite not being at all religious, I seem to have spent quite a lot of time reading and writing about very religious people. I wrote my PhD – which I’m turning into a book at the moment – on Dutch Reformed evangelicals and their interest in childhood in the late-nineteenth-century Cape Colony. Want to know about the surprisingly complicated theological battles that raged, viciously, between warring factions of Dutch Reformed ministers in the 1850s and 1860s? Then I’m your woman.

One of the most interesting diaries I came across during my research was written by Caroline Molteno (1853-1937), the daughter of the Cape Colony’s first Prime Minister. (The Cape was granted responsible government in 1872, and John Molteno served as Prime Minister until 1878). Caroline was not a member of the DRC, but her journals written during her early- and mid-teens opened up the world of white, middle-class girls and young women in Cape Town in the 1860s and 1870s.

Caroline’s diary was useful because she was deeply conventional. She worked hard at school, left when it was socially appropriate to do so (shortly before her seventeenth birthday), travelled to Europe with her father, and attended the round of balls, parties, teas, and cricket matches which helped her to find an eligible husband. She married Charles Murray – the future president of the South African Medical Association – in 1876, and they had eight children. She devoted herself to her family and good works.

Caroline wanted desperately to fit in to white, middle-class Capetonian society. Her older sister Betty (1852-1927), though, did not. Betty was as prolific a diary- and letter-writer, but fought against the life path that her sisters followed, apparently, so meekly. (Alongside Caroline there was another sister, Maria, and seven brothers, three of whom followed their father into politics.)

Betty refused to leave school, choosing to board at their girls’ institution in the city centre, rather than returning to the Molteno home in the leafy, prosperous suburb of Claremont. She trained as a teacher and, after some opposition from her family, travelled to Britain, where she studied at Newnham College, Cambridge. On her return to South Africa she met her partner Alice Greene (a relative of the better known Graham Greene), and the two spent a long, shared life in teaching – they worked at Collegiate School in Port Elizabeth – and activism. They were friends with Olive Schreiner, knew Emily Hobhouse, and were close associates of Gandhi.

These two peripatetic feminists – they returned, eventually, to the UK and are buried side-by-side in Cornwall – were also members of the Theosophical Society. Founded in New York in 1875 by the Russian-born spiritualist Helena Blavatsky, Theosophy was, in many ways, part of the broader Victorian interest in the occult. But its interests extended beyond séances and efforts to contact the other side. Mark Bevir explains:

The theosophists adopted three basic aims: to promote the brotherhood of man, to investigate the hidden powers of life and matter, and to encourage the study of comparative religion.

So for all its interest in belief and the unseen, Theosophy encourages greater contact and understanding between people of all faiths. Its maxim, ‘There is no religion higher than truth,’ captures, I think, the path it walks between the spiritual and the temporal.

The Melbourne Theosophical Society.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Theosophy was attractive to a disparate group of nineteenth-century radicals, the best-known being Rudolf Steiner and Annie Besant, both of whom held prominent positions within the organisation. Besant led Theosophy after Blavatsky’s death in 1891. In fact, Besant is a prime example of how, as Sheila Rowbotham writes in her biography of Edward Carpenter, ‘left politics and lifestyle were inclined to fuse.’ These ‘alternate lifers – socialists, anarchists, Theosophists, vegetarians’ – clustered together, joining one another’s societies and supporting one another’s causes.

Besant, like GB Shaw, was a member of the Vegetarian Society and a suffragette. Leah Leneman has written about the surprisingly high numbers of vegetarians in the British women’s suffrage movement. She argues that feminists’ interest in vegetarianism stemmed partly from their opposition to animal cruelty and vivisection, but was also the product of the Theosophical Society’s influence over so many late-Victorian women. Theosophy’s willingness to countenance sexual equality and to allow women to occupy important positions within the movement, made it attractive to educated, politically left-leaning women.

Although vegetarianism is not a prerequisite for membership of the Theosophical Society, it certainly promotes vegetarianism – and this is partly a result of Blavatsky’s interest in Hinduism. Indeed, one particularly prominent member of the London Vegetarian Society was Gandhi, who joined while a student in the UK between 1888 and 1891. He also became interested in Theosophy. Stephen Hay explains:

After a year or so in London the young Hindu made the acquaintance of a number of Europeans deeply interested in the culture of ancient India. The first two were members of the newly founded Theosophical Society… [and they] took Gandhi to meet Madame Blatavsky and her recent convert from atheism, Annie Besant. He subsequently read Blavatsky’s Key to Theosophy which ‘stimulated in me the desire to read a book on Hinduism and disabused me of the notion fostered by the [Christian] missionaries … that Hinduisim was rife with superstition.’

These British theosophists and members of the Vegetarian Society were, through their interest in Indian society and religion, early supporters of Indian nationalism. Besant had a long and complicated relationship with this movement: she founded the Indian Home Rule League in 1916 and was a member of the Indian National Congress.

What she and her fellow vegetarians and theosophists opened up to Gandhi and other western-educated Indians was a new way of understanding India: one that embraced Hinduism as a sophisticated set of beliefs, and which celebrated India’s rich and ancient history.

As Theosophy drew on a range of belief systems, it spread outwards from the United States and Britain. Theosophical Societies were established in South African cities too. As far as I can see, there were branches in Cape Town, Pretoria, and Johannesburg by the early years of the twentieth century – and they are still in existence.

Betty Molteno and Alice Greene – feminists, vegetarians, political radicals – were early South African Theosophists too. When Gandhi lived in South Africa (1893-1914), he seems to have been involved in the Johannesburg Lodge’s activities, reading occasionally from the Bhagavad Gita – a text which he had first read in translation while in England.

The Cape Town Theosophical Society.

Theosophy helped, then, to reframe Gandhi’s understanding of India – not as a place needing reform from civilised foreigners, but, rather, as a nation which could draw on its own histories and traditions. (Of course, this new idea of India was as heavily constructed as that taught to Gandhi and other western-educated Indians.) Vegetarianism did something similar: associated with self-control, purity, and a profoundly ethical relationship with the world, vegetarianism became symbolic of Gandhi’s own form of political struggle and vision for a free India.

What understanding the origins of the vegetarian movement and other, related organisations – like Theosophy – demonstrates, is that choices around what we eat have long been political: they are connected with the ways in which we choose to think about and wield power.

Sources

Mark Bevir, ‘Theosophy and the Origins of the Indian National Congress,’ International Journal of Hindu Studies, vol. 7, nos. 1-3 (2003), pp. 99-115.

‘Saying that a food is “like crack”…is intended to be an edgy way of emphasising how instantly gratifying it is, and how difficult it is to stop eating it once it’s in front of you. Unfortunately, all it really does is demonstrate how out of touch and callously classist foodie culture has become.’

I think we pulled it off too. It was certainly a fun conference: the food was excellent, I learned a great deal – about my own area of specialisation and others – and was surprised by how frequently papers presented from wildly different disciplines spoke to each other in interesting and quite thought-provoking ways. We’re keen for this new field of the medical humanities not only to encourage collaboration and contact between the arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural and medical sciences, but also to be communicated to those outside of the academy. The Mail and Guardian has published a collection of articles drawn from the conference:

Because I was part of the group keeping the conference running, I didn’t attend many sessions, but I did get to the two on medicine and nutrition (partly because I chaired one of them). The first included two papers: Kristen Ehrenberger (who’s enrolled for both a medical degree and a PhD in History at the University of Illinois) discussed how Germans’ ideas around ‘healthy’ food shifted during the Allied blockade of the First World War; and Thomas Cousins, an anthropologist at Stellenbosch University, argued for the necessity of a cultural and social study of the gut.

In the second session, Louise Vincent and Chantelle Malan from Rhodes University questioned the ways in which the obesity ‘crisis’ has been framed by both medical professionals and organisations with a vested interest in controlling people’s weight. Similarly, Michelle Pentecost – a medical doctor who’s completing an MA in anthropology at Oxford – pointed out that obesity is caused less by individual sloth and lack of self-control, than is the outcome of a complex set of social, political, and economic processes which shape people’s health over long periods of time.

Catherine Burns, my colleague at WiSER, spoke about the need to write histories of breastfeeding in South Africa (she’s written about histories of sex in South Africa too), and Vashna Jagarnath, also of Rhodes, presented a fascinating paper on Gandhi’s shifting attitudes towards diet after his move to London in 1881. She made the point that his embrace of vegetarianism was the product of an association with the Vegetarian Society and with the social and political radicals, many of them early supporters of Indian nationalism, who were part of the Society (people like Annie Besant, for instance). He went on to publish extensively on how best to eat, and, as Vashna noted, his views on diet were increasingly tangled with his politics.

Although on a wide range of subjects, these papers made a few key points: people’s decisions what and how to eat are shaped by a variety of factors, only some of which they are aware; food and nutrition are always political (they are implicated in the ways in which power functions); and our ideas about what is ‘good’ to eat have changed – and are changing – over time and place. In other words, there was no particular moment, or there is no specific place, where people ate, or are eating, a ‘perfect’ diet (whatever we may mean by that).

Although histories of food and nutrition have attracted scant attention from southern African scholars, the field is growing, both in size and prominence, internationally. I think the best indicator of its growing academic respectability is the fact that the theme of this year’s Anglo-American Conference at the Institute of Historical Research in London, was Food in History.

Histories of food have the potential to descend into a kind of pedantic, irritating antiquarianism, but they are also crucial to understanding histories of consumerism, agriculture, the body, and medicine. Indeed, anyone interested in medical histories of childhood has to focus on the significance of nutrition in efforts to improve children’s health during the early twentieth century.

We are – and have been for a very long time – what, how, and why we eat.

I’m Sarah Emily – that’s me about to eat an enormous breakfast – and welcome to my blog. I’m a South African historian who’s specialised in histories of childhood, food, and medicine.

This is not a food blog, but, rather, a blog about food – and, more specifically, about food, eating, and cooking. The world has enough recipes for red velvet cake floating around the internet. Here, I’m taking a closer look at the complex relationships between eating and identity; between cooking and politics; and between food and power.